Her Father's Daughter
by Evil Asian Genius
Summary: As far back as she could remember, Ryoko had always been alone. But that was not completely true. She had Ryo-ohki, and she had Kagato.


Her Father's Daughter

He could not kill her. 

It had taken weeks of planning to get this right. But now, he could not bring himself to kill her. Six hours had passed since he had sealed her sleeping body inside the stasis field. He spent the first few hours checking the systems obsessively, making sure there were no mistakes, and now, for the last hour, he merely watched her. He stared sullenly at her, her delicate lips half-frowning in repose, the brilliant sheen of her spiked red hair muted by the glow of the field's energy. Pressing his face against the sharp edge of the cold metal table he had laid her on, he thought of the options that he had, and wondered what he should do next.   
            Startled by a noise, he lifted his head to see the shadow of a toddling figure pass through the doorway. He stood up, walking over to catch the child up in his arms. She had just started walking recently, and though part of him was proud of her little milestones, he could not shake the feeling of uneasiness at her unnatural development. He turned, resting the child against his shoulder, listening to her childish babbling, and looked back at Washu's still form. 

            She wasn't the first child he had ever fathered, but she would likely be his last. True that his part in the affair was minimal at best. Merely a drop of his blood was required for the procedure, but to him, that was enough; she was his. From the onset, everything had been fine. He had even helped Washu hand-tailor the child's genes, unusual during those times, but not taboo. He himself was the result of generations of selective breeding, his genes highly desirable by any galactic standard.  
            He had been present when the child was born, and had even caught her in his capable hands as she entered the world. But then, shortly after the birth, even before the formal naming ceremony, he had caught Washu infusing the child with Masu, and that was when it had all started falling apart.  
            Real children drooled and wet themselves; spat up on one's dress uniform and cried half the night for want of attention. They didn't have arcane gems embedded in their flesh that infused them with powers beyond mortal comprehension. Real children were hungry little creatures, and needed their waste cleaned up for them. They did not have the ability to never require milk or juice or a change of diapers. Real children did not spend over a hundred years as an infant. Real children's minds were not based on a hundred trillion lines of complex programming. Washu had changed their daughter into something that he could not understand; changed her from a human being into something else entirely different.  
            He knew the history, and he knew the law. He was the father after all, and no matter what the circumstances of the child's birth, a child could never be illegitimate as long as it was acknowledged. He knew it was within his rights by the ancient laws of his people, Holy Council of Jurai be damned, to terminate the inhuman…thing that his child had become. He would have strangled the little monster himself if he thought that was possible, but he had done his research, and knew that the gems imparted powers beyond his understanding.  
            At the same time, however, part of him did not want to see this child come to an end, part of him was curious to see how this little experiment would play out. Though his feelings were all tangled up in the matter, he was still fundamentally curious about the little being, especially since Washu had refused to let him know anything more than the most basic facts, as if she did not trust him with the information. That, more than anything, had wounded not only his pride, but cracked the foundations of their friendship.  
            Betrayal. The word stung his heart, and he refused to let it wound him further. He forced the hurt aside, replacing it with a cold rage that shielded him from further pain, letting the icy chill seep into his heart until he was numbed. Washu had betrayed his trust, played Goddess with a life that only half-belonged to her, and experimented on this his last child.  
            He should kill her, jettison her helpless, lifeless form out into the depths of space and let nature take its course. That would have been the rational thing to do.  
            But he could not bring himself to do it. The old ethics that had governed his life before he abandoned them haunted him with guilt. You did not betray the friend that stood by your side- that was disloyal. You did not raise your hand against your master- that was…   
            He shook his head, as if trying to clear himself of the weight of the past.   
            He could not kill her. He owed her better than that. But he could make sure that she would never again be free to interfere in his life ever again.  
            He felt a sharp pain as the little girl tugged at loose strands of his long pale hair. Grimacing, he gently untangled her diminutive fingers, and looked deeply into the luminous golden eyes that mirrored his own. He had never been able to get a clear answer out of Washu why she had chosen to base many of this child's features on his own, but then again, he could not get any specific information out of her about this child. 

Over the next few weeks, he worked with the intense fervor of a fanatic, opening a gate into the Souja's alternate dimensional half, setting up guardians that would watch over her as she slept, and letting the inorganic crystalline life form slowly encase her still body. After he was done, he keyed the dimensional half so that it could not be accessible to anyone including himself unless he was killed, so that he would never be tempted to set her free. He would never have to face her again, not while he was still alive. And one night, he sat the child down, accessed her memory, and delicately blurred them, letting time take care of the rest. 

************************

As far back as she could remember she had always been alone.   
            No, that was not completely true. She had Ryo-ohki, and she had Kagato. But Ryo-ohki could not speak to her, except in a symbolic language more akin to dreaming than anything resembling human speech. And Kagato would not speak to her, except when he chose to, and even that was growing increasingly rare as the years passed.  
            She knew from observation that he was not a completely unfeeling man, so it troubled her young mind that he rebuffed her awkward attempts to play with him, and sternly reprimanded her for her habit of following him around at every opportunity. It seemed that nothing good she could do would interest him for longer than the time it took to make a quick notation in his files before returning his attention to whatever work was at hand. So too often in those early days, she acted out, willfully destroying or sabotaging the work that was so inexplicably dear to him, trying to provoke some sort of reaction from him, some sign of interest or acknowledgement.   
            Initially, she had put him in a terrific rage, but after subsequent attempts, the reaction was always the same. He would clean up whatever mess she had created, and quietly banish her to some remote corner of his subspace laboratory where she could do no harm. So she had upped the ante, observing him to see what she could get her hands on that was even more important to him than the stacked tablets, data modules, and other strange devices that were never far from his reach.   
            Then she realized what it was. She had seen him toy with the devices often enough in the past; small, metallic cubes from which a miniaturized holographic figure emerged. He had a triad of these devices that he kept in his spartan quarters, and occasionally would spend anywhere from a few minutes to hours observing the various holographic recordings stored within them. She had observed him secretly, watching his long pale fingers activate a module, surprised to see his face mysteriously soften, relaxing from its usual calculated cynicism as he focused on the tiny translucent being. It was perhaps the only time she saw him consistently exhibit any type of emotion; sometimes it seemed that he was lost in inner regret. Other times, he might laugh, breaking the stillness with a resonant mirth that rang through his chambers.   
            One day, knowing that he would be busy in his laboratory for at least several hours more, she had let herself into his private quarters. With vaguely defined plans of stealing a cube, she plunked herself down on the gleaming polished desktop, and picked one up. Her hand was hardly large enough to encompass the whole, but through trial and error, she had figured out how to turn it on. Immediately, a tiny figure emerged, wearing a dual toned green coat over a simple dark violet uniform. She had watched it with an intense curiosity, for she had never seen the image up close before, nor had been within range to hear the voice that emanated from it.   
            Strange. The figure had dark, midnight hair, something that she had never seen before. It spoke with a higher-toned voice, and was oddly shaped, with soft rounded curves instead of angular corners, and an animation to its expressions that surprised her with their complexity. There was something truly appealing about this, and for a moment, she thought that she understood what had brought him to spend so much time with this little device.   
            Then the image disappeared for a moment, as one recording ended and another began. The same figure reappeared, only this time accompanied by a smaller being, whom she automatically identified with, looking somewhat in the shape of herself, though with that same, strange dark hair and ruddy complexion. She watched and listened with growing interest as the figure laughed, and with practiced hands swung the little being up into its arms. The figure continued talking, and she began to learn some new and unfamiliar concepts. Family. Daughter. Mother. Father.

************************

  
            Hours passed as she watched recording after recording, half-understanding what she saw and heard. Suddenly, without warning, the door had opened with a whisk. Startled and panicking, she crushed the fragile cube in her hands, bits of metal alloy falling and clinking around her in a shower of energy sparks as the device snapped apart.     He looked truly surprised, completely caught off guard, and nearly dropped the cup of steaming tea that he had brought with him. Pausing minutely, he absently threw the ceramic cup into a convenient pocket dimension, and then stormed in, a raging swirl of motion as his heavy dual toned green coat swung out behind him from the quickness of his movement.   
            In one quick motion, he had hoisted her up by the back of her collar, and dumped her on the chair before the desk, all the while searching with his free hand for the tiny crystalline structure that held the actual memory of the device she had shattered. She looked up to see him looming over her, his face betraying an anxiety she had never seen before. When he found the memory crystal among the shards of metal and wiring, he actually slumped against the desk momentarily, sighing in relief. Examining it for a second, he nodded to himself, opened a pocket of subspace, and dropped the little gem in.   
            She was filled with a mixture of terror and elation, fearful of what he was going to do next, for she was delving into uncharted territory, yet thrilled in her heart to see him actually wear his feelings openly on his face. Yet all of this excitement was tinged with a strange, unsettling feeling that she could not identify, a burning, twisting emotion that ate at her insides and made her want to shrink away and disappear. Yet she knew better than to try to disappear as she could indeed do, for he was always, without fail, able to find her, no matter where she could try hiding.   
            When his attention turned back to her after he cleared away the glittering fragments, his eyes darkened with anger, and his thin lips twisted with suppressed emotion. He took a deep breath as he struggled to maintain his composure, and she could almost see his thought processes flitting through the surface of his eyes as he struggled to come up with something to say to her. For a moment, she felt a pang of regret for what she did, and not knowing how to deal with this emotion, she sulked, drawing her arms close about her and glared back at him in defiant silence.   
            "You…how dare you?" He knelt down before her and grabbed her tightly by the shoulders, glaring deep into her eyes. "I gave you strict orders to stay away from this place. Why have you disobeyed me? What were you doing with my holographic display?  
            This time, she resolved not to answer him, and though she was quaking within with fear, she refused to betray it, emulating his cool disdain. She returned his hard gaze unyieldingly.  
            He paused, waiting for her response, looking into pale eyes that reflected his own. When he realized she was not about to answer him, his anger got the better of him. He shook her roughly for a second, as though he could physically elicit a response where questioning failed.  
            But he stopped himself with controlled effort, letting her go. Unfolding his formidable height, he stood back up, and leaned against the cool metal surface of his desk, tapping his index finger thoughtfully against his chin. "No, mustn't get upset. After all, she's not human…she's just a machine. It's not as though she would be aware of what she's done. Still, there must be a programming glitch somewhere…" He trailed off, thoughtfully, looking down at her. Scooping her up, he sat her down on the flat surface of the desk, took a seat in the chair before her, and brought up a computer terminal between them.  
            She always hated this part of it all, how he would suddenly pretend as though nothing had happened, ignoring her so that he could play with his shadow machines. This time however, it was far worse than usual; she was deeply troubled by his words and could not accept them. She knew that she was a human being, she was certain of it. She knew she was just like the image of the little girl in his cube. After all, for all the strangeness of that one's looks, they were both cut from the same fabric. She reflected on the memory of those holographic projections, remembering some of the new words and ideas she had learnt. Suddenly, she pushed her face through the screen of his spectral terminal, interrupting him with a start.  
            "But I'm not a machine, Father, I'm a little girl." Her eyes searched his questioningly.  
            He looked at her blankly, completely baffled, before realizing where she could have learned this new vocabulary to define herself. Amusement grew on his face for a moment, and chuckling, he sat her gently back down so that he could continue with his data manipulation. Amazing design, he thought, that she was able to completely incorporate new concepts into her repertoire, with absolute fluidity and precision.  
            "No, I am not your father, my little creature, I am Kagato. And as for you, you were born in the usual manner, but you're not human. Not in the strict sense at least." He continued typing merrily away, past anger forgotten in a surge of scientific curiosity.

Again, she interrupted him by pressing herself through his screen. "But…" she reached out and tugged close a long strand of his hair, and brought it against her own, the complimentarily pale strands mingling for a moment before swinging away. She then touched her face with a diminutive finger, pointing toward her own two eyes in succession, and touched the high cheekbones of his face lightly, before pointing toward hers.

            "Ah, observant, are we? Well now, that's a story from a long time ago…but it's not any of your business, my little Ryoko. Now sit." His words held a strong tone of finality.  
            She sat back down obediently, childish fingers pressed thoughtfully to her lips, trying to make sense of what he had revealed. Though the details were vague, she could not accept this. It was beginning to not make any sense at all. She knew from those recordings that children looked like their parents. After all, did the figure not mention how the little girl "looked more like her mother than her father?" Then, as she thought about it, the mystery began to make some sense to her. She sat watching him sitting merely inches from her, and observed his angular face through the translucent screen of his terminal, so focused on his work that he didn't even notice her.  
            Not knowing the full impact of his words, he continued working, humming tonelessly to himself. This sort of spontaneous discovery was pure enjoyment, and the challenge of cracking such an elegant little puzzle brought a slight smile to his thin lips. The remarkable ingenuity of Washu's creations had never failed to impress him, even now after so much time had passed since his extended tenure as her assistant. He had always loved the cleverness of her designs, even though he had not always loved the creator of said designs. As he waited for his calculations to compile, he indulged himself in a few pleasant memories of the past, when his life and all its constituent elements were so much simpler.

            But memories were tricky things, and his was dragging him down a path in his life that he did not want to revisit. A cherished friendship gone horribly awry; bitter, angry fights that lasted months; building resentments and mutual accusations; the end result leading to shattered loyalties and that ultimate betrayal that he could never forgive. He half-closed his eyes, trying to will away the memories, trying not to revisit those times when he had both all that he had ever desired and nothing of true value that he could actually have.

Noticing that he had stopped typing and was resting with narrow eyes half-closed, gazing pensively off into the distance, she decided for him that he was finished with whatever he had been doing. Impatiently, she quickly made up her mind, choosing not to wait until later, but would ask him right away.

            "Father?  Who is my mother?"

            Kagato's eyes narrowed minutely.  "I am not your father.  You have no mother."

            "No!  Tell me who my mother is!"

            "Don't be irrational, Ryoko.  I told you.  You have no mother.  You are not a human being."  Kagato stated irritably.  In his head, he could hear Washu laughing at him.  Laughing at his inability to comprehend or even vaguely control this little gift she had left him.  Laughing at his incompetence.

            "You're lying," Ryoko's eyes glimmered faintly with tears.  It was impossible.  Impossible.  How could she have no mother?  How could she not be human?

            "And you're impertinent.  Now shut up before I send you out of my sight."

            Ryoko's eyes took on a far more dangerous gleam than tears alone.  She quickly manipulated the tiny muscles in her eyes, effectively shutting off her tear ducts, blinking away the rest.  Before he could move, she let out a tiny, controlled burst of energy, severing the invisible link between him and his spectral screen, causing the screen to dissipate in a flash of light.

            "What.  Did.  You.  Do?"  Kagato's voice was ferocious.  She had never seen him this mad before, and inwardly, she felt a nearly hysterical, almost maniacal glee.  

            "Who is my mother?"  She demanded, her voice getting louder.  "I know you know!  You're lying!  You know!  Tell me!"

            "You have no mother."

            "Why won't you tell me?  You're a liar!  I have to have a mother! I have to!"  He grabbed her, his hands clasping her small shoulders tight, his fierce eyes boring into hers.

"You have no mother! You are a machine!  I created you, and I can just as easily take that away!"

"NO!  I HATE YOU!  YOU'RE LYING TO ME!"  Suddenly, energy swiftly built up to an increasingly explosive level.  Ryoko's body began glowing, and then became a pure burst of intense power that hung onto a thread of control for barely a millisecond before exploding in a raging, fiery storm.  Before Kagato could react, the energy blast flung him across the room, and he slammed hard against the far wall with a sickening crunch, leaving a spider web of fractures in the stone behind him.  His body slumped down against the wall before crumpling into a motionless mass on the floor.  

Several long seconds passed while fine particles of stone dust settled down around him in a monotone veil.  For a split second, his eyes flicked open, looking at her incomprehensibly, not quite understanding what had just occurred.  He was too dazed to apply that brilliant mind of his to anything but the muddled thought: Who will take care of her once I am gone?  

Kagato's eyes begrudgingly shut.

************************

Silence.

Ryoko was alone.  All she could hear was her own jagged breathing, her half-sobbed breaths coming hard and uneven.  And she wasn't mad anymore.   She was scared.  From across the room she could see that blood was leaking out of his mouth and nose, spilling into a growing pool of scarlet fluid in the ground before him.  His hands and forearms…they didn't look the same anymore.  They were charred almost beyond recognition, white glimpses of bone showing through where the flesh had seared away.  

Ryoko swallowed, hard, willing away the nausea.  Tears that had been forcibly silenced before streamed down her cheeks, and she curled up against the flat cold stone of his desk, not caring if he saw her, if he could see her.

In a flash, Ryo-ohki appeared before her, responding to her distress.  She caught up the little furry cabbit in her small hands; her fingers digging into the warm fur, her arms pulling Ryo-ohki close against her.  She wept, her hot sobbing tears muffled against Ryo-ohki's fur, little mews of concern filling her ears.  

As her tears subsided, Ryoko shivered, her body ice-cold from shock.  She wanted to run away, but there was no place to go in this big, lonesome ship.  The shadows seemed more ominous, pressing against her, in a prison of stone and darkness and loneliness, forever and ever.  Ryoko felt a welling panic grow in her heart, and a hiccoughing sob rise in her throat.

But then, a sound.  Her highly sensitive ears caught a tiny noise; a rasping breath.  Still holding Ryo-ohki close, she sat up, turning toward where he lay, her cheeks cool and damp with drying tears.

Another shallow breath.  Ryoko screwed up her courage, and slid off the tall table.  Ryo-ohki leaped out of her arms and onto the floor, cautiously stepping before Ryoko, affording her an additional sense of security.

And another.  Ryoko slinked up close to him, and knelt down where he lay, his arms skewed akimbo before him, the acrid scent of charred flesh filling her nose.  She turned to Ryo-ohki, her eyes filled with fear, as if the little cabbit could tell her what to do so that everything would be all right, so that he would wake up, and so that he wouldn't be mad at her anymore.

            She bit her trembling lip, trying to think of what she should do, as the pool of blood slowly increased, soaking the knees of her leggings a hot, sticky crimson.  His hands.  Maybe she could do something to fix his hands.  

            Instinctively, Ryoko reached out to touch them, forcing herself not to shy away from the crumbling black flesh, the ghostly white bone that appeared wherever her fingers touched him.  She tried to channel her power into him, in small pulses of energy so as not to hurt him, assuming that perhaps that was what he needed.  But it wasn't enough; the flesh and bones were too far destroyed.  They could not be brought back intact, even as his arms were suddenly infused with the glow of her power.

            She looked at his arms, puzzled, unsure of how to continue.  Her eyes roamed the destroyed flesh of his hands, looking for a clue before it flickered over the gleaming, pulsing gem in her wrist.

            Ryoko took her hands away from him.  Methodically, she took out one gem after another from her wrists, and put the two, one each, into each of Kagato's maimed palms, the gems settling into the gaping cracks in the flesh.  If the gems could sustain her, why not him?  If they could heal her bruises and scrapes, why not this?

She didn't know exactly why she did it.  Far in the future she would have regretted this moment, replaying the memory as a time where she should have just walked away, if she had foreknowledge of what was to come.  But at the time, it was right.  It felt right.

It was the only thing she could have done.  Ryoko needed him back.

The gems glowed intensely, their light infusing the room with a blood-red glow.  She watched carefully, and they seemed to flicker in and out of existence for a minute, before rising and settling into a steady float before Kagato's hands.  

            Millimeter by millimeter, his charred fingers broke into particles that disappeared as quickly as they shattered off his hands.  Ryoko felt the gems impart their energy into him, filling him with their healing power, her affinity with the gleaming orbs telling her that they were restoring him with their boundless energy.  The power of the gems fluctuated and increased as it gave, filling the air with a translucent gossamer purity.

            Many slow minutes passed.  She watched as the gems slowly transformed him, his hands and forearms slowly disappearing, replaced with pure energy.  Sensing the gems' completion, she reached out her hands to them, a proud smile on her face, as the gems gently returned to their rightful place.  Ryoko sat back against her heels, and waited for Kagato to awaken.

************************

            Some hours later Kagato's eyelids flickered, and just beyond the veil of his pale eyelashes, he could see Ryoko's knees pressed together neatly, resting against the stone, the pale green fabric caked with brown flakes of drying blood.  Kagato coughed weakly, a trickle of blood seeping out of the corner of his mouth.  He vaguely remembered something about an explosion, and not much else after that, but for a whisper of a memory of warmth suffusing his body.

            Kagato opened his amber eyes.  Gods, his body hurt.  He felt nauseously sick, and his arms tingled unbearably.  He tried to mentally assess the damage, but it was beyond his current state of reasoning.  Dizzily, he forced himself up, leaning his weight on his right hand.  The stone beneath his fingertips felt odd, and he absently turned his head to see what was the matter.

            The right hand was gone.  He turned his head.  So was the left.  Kagato blinked. 

            "Well…that…explains why it feels..." Before he could finish his sentence, he weakly slumped down again against the stone floor, drained.

            Ryoko reached out to press her cool palm against the skin of his cheek.  His eyes turned up toward her, half-focused.  She leaned close to look at him concernedly; Ryo-ohki perched precariously on her head.

            "'s nice, Ry…oko…w- what happened?"

            "I was bad."  Ryoko said miserably, in a tiny voice.  "But I helped fix it."

            "Good…girl.  Now go get…me the…medkit."  Kagato closed his eyes wearily.

************************

            Kagato never quite figured out the mystery of his new hands, at least not to the extent that he would have preferred.  Prior to the event, every inch of Souja had been covered in sensors, which apparently all blew out at once when Ryoko threw her little tantrum.

            But it wasn't just his hands.  Something had happened to him, something involving her gems.  His powers were increased manifold, with attributes similar to hers.  The energy spectrums were so similar that sometimes it almost felt as though he could feel the resonant energy pulsing through the two of them, synchronizing and re-synchronizing in a faintly asymmetrical, offbeat pattern.  

            Kagato resolved to understand this power, and to learn how to control it, not only within himself, but also within her.   If for nothing, it would be for his own protection, so that there would be no repeats of this incident.  But over time, as his desires and interests changed their focus and became more intensely involved in the acquisition of power, he fantasized about learning how to wield her like a blade for his own purposes.  It became an all-consuming obsession.

            As for Ryoko, she kept her questions to herself.  She never asked him about her mother again.  Though sometimes, when she was alone, in the dark, she would imagine warm arms around her, holding her close, whispering to her that she was loved, that she was not alone.  But as she grew older, she pushed those idle thoughts further from her mind.

After all, she wasn't human.  And most importantly, she wasn't her father's daughter.

Characters belong to AIC and Pioneer.  
  
Thanks to all those who should be thanked (you know who you are). Without your tireless support in convincing me to publish, I wouldn't be covered in bruises.   
Thanks to Cyrus and Mary for prereading the final draft.   
Special thanks to Keener Barnes. If you hadn't encouraged me, helped me with my ideas, and proofread every single draft I ever made, I would never have done nearly so well, and probably would have never published anything or continued on with what I had.   This one's for you, Keener.

Author's notes: 

Well, I never thought I'd finish this. It's been like my own personal albatross for the last year or so. HFD is the first fic I ever attempted, and has gone through many, many drafts, including the defunct original, "In the shadow of her father." At this moment, it's also the first fic I've ever finished (other than some short one-shot spam fics). So, many firsts in this one. Hope you enjoyed it. 

Just a little side note: Much, much later, I realized that I should have done something about his eyes in this fic (that they changed). Oh well. I'll figure it out in another story. ;) 

Questions and comments can be sent to [cori_ohki@hotmail][1].com Or just leave a review. Thank you for reading. 

   [1]: mailto:cori_ohki@hotmail



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